As contemporary communication technologies, such as the Internet, and interactive technologies, such as a video-on-demand service, increasingly rely on more information-rich types of media to enhance their popularity and/or capabilities, there is an increasing need to capture, analyze, segment, index, retrieve, and distribute the massive amount of information contained within the types of media available within these technologies. However, due to the massive amount of information within such media (e.g., an audio file or video file), traditional search techniques that are used to capture, analyze, segment, index, retrieve and/or distribute information from a static document may be less than optimal when applied to these types of media. Therefore, the processing of certain types of information-rich media files is often performed using manual judgments and determinations. For example, relevant segments of a video stream may be manually identified within a video (e.g., label a segment of video according to a manually identified topic of the segment). Additionally or alternatively, the beginning and end of different segments of a video may be manually identified.
Thus, there remains an ever-present need to provide for the capture, analysis, segmentation, indexing, retrieval and distribution of information related to media with greater functionality, accuracy and speed.